


Please stop looking at me

by lazylilking



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Dealing With Loss, M/M, PG
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 18:58:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3458243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazylilking/pseuds/lazylilking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean hadn't been in the car when his boyfriend went into the river. He was at the ambulance after they pulled him out. He was there at the hospital with family members who were as torn up over the loss of their son as they were confused at how hard Jean took it.</p><p>It's the night after Marco's funeral, and now Jean's at home, drunk, and wishing everyone would stop looking at him like the world was ending. He already knows it has.</p><p>There is one friend who gets it, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Please stop looking at me

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this too late at night and need sleep. There's no gore, sex, or anything fun really, although alcohol abuse is here. Enjoy.

The porch light chased me through the front door of my shitty trailer like a worried friend. Even through the slight buzz of alcohol fuzzing my vision I could see the way it outlined my shadow on the floor, displaying my broken appearance in a stark silhouette of pity I’d been swimming through since the accident. The shaking black lines cast from my legs were the soft voices of my friends saying “another?” as I tossed back another shot. The blob of duffel bag was the look his mother gave me when she handed them over, trembling lips telling me to keep them; he’d want me to have them. The hang of my shoulders, interrupted by the line of carpet, was the hug Connie gave me after his eyes widened with realization. The lowering of my head was every person between the hospital and the funeral who couldn’t bear to look at me in my current state. And it pissed me off.

Mostly because the anger was easier to bear than the pain.

The duffel bag swayed off my hip somewhere between slamming the door with my foot and stumbling into my livingroom. I didn’t need to worry about looking up—the picture frames were all on the ground, face down, and smashed from the force of a man with a hole torn through his heart. It didn’t matter. I still kept my head down. I knew what would be waiting for me when I didn’t.

He sat in the recliner across from the couch, my old college sweater falling off his shoulder in a way that somehow matched his lopsided smile. His basketball shorts hung loose on his hip as he laughed at my morning hair, telling me breakfast was in the fridge.

Or, maybe, he was sitting next to me at the dining room table with a milk moustache and dark circles as he wrapped his brain around calc homework, too stubborn to ask for my help.

If not that, then he was definitely waiting for me on the couch, clothes carefully folded on the floor beside him as he breathed my name like it was his salvation.

It was the same couch I flopped onto face first, too drunk to care about the ducktape stratching at my face in the dark. The silence enveloped me with an equal part relief and torment, the absence of sorry eyes almost canceling out the memories that replaced them.

I didn’t remember going to the kitchen, or the first half of a fifth of Jack. I did remember the way he always scolded me for drinking, saying how I shouldn’t abuse my legal right to buy the liquor. I didn’t remember turning on my ipod dock, but I did remember all the times I had done it before, setting various moods for his amusement as I either swooned him out of his clothes or pulled him into a dumbed down version of a waltz. I definitely didn’t remember leaving the door unlocked, but I did pull out of my drunken stupor just long enough to feel a cool set of hands press into my forehead, and a pair of green eyes robbing me of the positive half of the silence.

“Jean…” He pushed my hair away from my face, my sweat holding it in place.

“Don’t, Eren.” I swatted his hand away, anger flaring up like a safety net. “Don’t start.”

“…I wasn’t going to.”

I looked back at him after some consideration, hearing a note of truthfulness I’d rather not admit in his voice. His eyes looked at me with a blank intensity I’d come to know only from the twenty year old, and I’ll be damned if they weren’t glowing in the low light. The stove light was on in the other room, and it was just enough to catch the outline of his black attire, still unchanged from the funeral hours before. Just like mine.

“Then why are you here?” It came out as a whisper, a plea. What exactly I was pleading for, I didn’t know. To bring him back? To end the horrible hollow cavern between my ribs? Eren just looked me over and started on my tie, sighing.

“Come on— let’s get you out of these depressing clothes.”

With a little too much aid than I’d like to admit, he helped me strip down to my boxers and undershirt, careful to make sure I didn’t mistake his movements as anything more than platonic or that they were done with pity. When we were done he disappeared into the hallway, coming back a few minutes later with a box fan and a pillow, sporting a pair of flannel pants and a t-shirt I knew were mine. Wordlessly he laid me down onto the couch and pulled the blanket down off the back, tucking me in like a kid. The silence settled again after he made his own space on the floor, using my pillow and another spare blanket. It was just then I realized he’d turned my ipod off.

“…Eren?”

“hmm.”

“…why… are you here?”

It wasn’t like we were the best of friends since Highschool. In fact, since entering college, he’d kept a pretty wide berth from me, and we’d come to blows a few times after a few too many drinks. I mostly knew him anymore through friends, or through Marco.

The silence chokes me as much as the name, and it was only after a hand came up and pushed my hair back that I realized I was crying again. “Because a long time ago, there was this gaping hole in my chest. I couldn’t breathe it hurt so much. Everything inside of me had been ripped out, and I was left with nothing but nostalgia and pain.”

He swallowed. “I’m here because after my mom’s death there was one person who didn’t give a shit how much I hurt. Their crass comments and general ass-holery only stabbed me deeper and deeper, but to this day I haven’t forgotten how much of a relief it was to have just that one person in a sea of sympathy not give a shit.”

I was quiet again, the fuzz of alcohol threatening to pull me under. “They sound like a real ass,” was all I could mumble, and a soft, throaty chuckle rippled up from below me.

“Yeah, they were.” Just as I fell into a fitful alcohol-induced slumber, I caught his last words.

“You still are, horseface.”

I didn’t dream of Marco that night.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr-- http://lazy-the-fandom.tumblr.com/


End file.
